


Irrigo

by anonymousAlchemist



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Trust me on this one, hold my hand let me take you on a word picture adventure, it just reads as a REALLY weird taz au then, this can be read without knowing about fallen london
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-05 23:25:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11588334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist
Summary: I is for Irrigo. Irrigo colours the forgotten colors of home. It is the color of things that need to be forgotten. Those who see it lose their memories.The Delightful Pyrotechnic has last been seen boarding a transport to the Neath, and her letters have stalled. The Mercurial Transmuter descends, looking for his sister.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> you can read this without knowledge of what fallen london is - but essentially, london was stolen by the bats and spirited to the Neath - literally underneath the earth. The Neath is something of a fantastic gaslamp fantasy steampunk situation, and i highly encourage everyone to play fallen london/sunless sea cause its so cool, heh. 
> 
> yeah i don't know why i wanted this au but i did, so its here now. we're all here now. i recommend subscribing if u like it because updates for this will be very irregular!

You board the ship at Twosun, a dingy little vessel caked with a sort of grime that you’ve never seen before. When you squint, it glows. You take with you: a pack filled with clothes and cooking supplies and alchemy materials, along with some surface food – you hear that sells dearly down below. You take your transmuter’s stone, and the letters from your sister, and that’s the last of your worldly possessions. 

You pay with a handful of coin pick-pocketed at the pier. 

“Surface currency, ah,” the man collecting your money says. “You’ll have a devil of a time exchanging this for echoes.”

“Echoes?” you ask.

“Currency in the Neath,” the man says. “But you’ll get paid in all sorts of bits and bobs. He inspects a silver coin, licks it. "Surface currency’s good for a lotta things, though.” He squints at you. 

“Whasyourname?" 

"Taa—”

“No, not your  _name_ , your name?”

“What?” you say.

He points at himself. “The Sloshed Sailer.”

Oh. Right. “The Mercurial Transmuter,” you tell him. It’s a cultural thing, you think. No names, only titles. Lup signs all her letters with the Delightful Pyrotechnician these days. She hasn’t sent a letter in months. She’s probably fine, just wrapped up in her work.

“A pleasure,” the man says in a mockery of your accent.

“Piss off,” you say, and board the ship. It doesn’t look any cleaner up close. But ships to Fallen Faerun are far and few between. Only a few other people are on the deck, but you want to watch the world disappear as you descend. 

You stare at the sky. Soon you can no longer see daylight. You shiver. How did Lup do this?

She had been so excited to go, you remember. You hadn’t wanted her to leave, but she received the invitation at Benthic University and she had said “it was such an opportunity, Taako, how am I supposed to pass it up” and “well I guess if you don’t want me to go, I won’t” with a disingenuous pout. You had rolled your eyes at that, and said, “jeez, just go then, goofus,” and she had hugged you. You still did not want her to leave. She left anyway, with a promise to write. And she did, like clockwork, long missives detailing the strangeness of the city, the curious corridors of the University, the man she had fallen in love with. He calls himself the Blue Necromancer. “But his name’s Barry,” she had written. “He’s from Twosun, too. But he’s been down here far longer than I have.” She declined to say by how much. 

She has not written in a month and a half. This is the longest you have gone without seeing her.  

“Hello!” 

You jump, whip your head around. One of the other passengers is smiling at you. How did he sneak up on you like that? He’s massive, a built brick shithouse of a man with magnificent sideburns. 

“Fuck, dude, don’t do that to a guy,” you say. 

“Sorry,” he says sheepishly. “I’m Magnus. Just thought I’d say hi. You’re the only other passenger on deck.”

“No names, dingus,” you say, looking around. Huh, whaddaya know, he’s right. 

“Shit, my bad,” Magnus says. “The Cheerful Carpenter.” He holds out his hand to shake. You take it warily. No one is this friendly. 

“The Mercurial Transmuter,” you say. You still feel stupid when saying that. 

He beams at you. Gods. It's like sunlight, that is to say, blinding. "Nice to meet you," he says. "Do you think we ought to go down, now?" 

You realize that the darkness has...changed. Before it was the absence of sunlight, the carved cave walls.. Now it feels like someone is watching you. It feels....oppressive. Like you shouldn't be there. You swear you can see...colors? in the darkness. You shiver a little. You've heard that things are weird in the Neath, but you weren't expecting this. Magnu-The Cheerful Carpenter looks unnerved as well, and he doesn't seem to be able to articulate why. 

"Lead the way, my man," you say. The two of you head belowdecks. 

It's better where the darkness can't see you. The ship is smokily lit with a haphazard candles in glass jars and lamps filled with something that doesn't look like lamp oil. You walk down the corridor purposefully. The man at the pier had told you that you would be in cabin 2B - shared quarters with three other men. The cheapest option. It's whatever. You'll be outta here in three days and in the meantime you'll sleep with your pack as a pillow. 

The Cheerful Carpenter follows you like a burly shadow. He does not mean to loom, you think, but he does anyway. It's offset by the stream of cheerful commentary he keeps up as you walk – okay, you can see how he got his name. You tune most of it out until you get to your door. 

"-nyway, so. Oh! you're 2B, too?" 

"Yeah," you say, startled. 

"Cool, guess we're bunk buds."

"My dude. My guy. Never say that again," you say, and fumble with the doorknob. You crack the door open. It's shabby little cabin, with two sets of bunk-beds and a chest of drawers. 

A short man with a beard is lounging on one of bottom bunks, reading a brightly colored paperback. He glances up at the two of you. 

"Bunks on the left are open," he says. "Nice to meetcha. I'm the Proselytizing Botanist. Either of you ever hear about Pan?" 

"I'm the Cheerful Carpenter, and that's the Mercurial Transmuter," your companion says. "Nice to meet you too." 

"I have no idea who Pan is, and I have even less interest in knowing," you say as you clamber up the ladder to the top bunk. First come first served. "But nice to meet you too, I guess." 

"Fair enough," your new friend says amiably. "Hope neither of you two snore." 

You snort. "I don't sleep." 

Beneath you, the Cheerful Carpenter sets his large pack on the lower bunk with a thump that rattles the frame. He sits down heavily. You look over the bunk at him, head turned upside down. He stares at you, surprised. 

"Hey, any chance you want to pretend that you're not a literal earthquake simulation machine?" 

"Oh, sorry." 

"No problemo," you say, and raise your head back up. You lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. So. You're doing this. 

It's not late, yet, and either way you've never been much for sleeping. But it's better to be here than abovedecks, and you don't feel much for exploring the ship right now. You pull your pack open and root around for Lup's last letter. It's been folded and refolded so many times that it's practically falling apart.

 

_Dear my favorite and also only brother,_

_Hope things up on the surface are good with you. How's the chef thing goin'? If you're not famous yet, then everyone else is nuts. Or you're not trying hard enough._

_Just writing to let you know I'm gonna be out of contact for a bit. Can't really explain in detail, sorry. Send any letters to me to the Blue Necromancer as per usual. But I'll be back soon. Talk to you later, dork. Love you._

_xoxo,_

_Delightful Pyrotechnic_

 

It's so short, compared to her usual ones. You fold it back up, carefully, and shove it to the bottom of your pack. 

Three days, you think. Then you'll be past the Cumaean Canal and docked at Fallen Faerun, and then you can get to looking for your sister. 


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two months pass and you still haven't found Lup. it's not for a lack of trying — you've asked around everywhere. It's slow going, though, between the fact that you don't know anybody and the fact that you're a foreigner. But that doesn't bother you too much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> coupla liner notes: we're going full turbo mashup with locations - im gonna gank both FL and taz names/places as applicable.  
> \- we're also playing fast and loose and sexy with both canons, and im ganking concepts as applicable and twisting em up into pretty little knots.  
> \- this is gonna probably be told in non-chronological order, and im not sure theres much of a plot persay. but we'll see. This is going where it ends up going, much like a runaway velocipede steered by rubbery men.

Two months pass and you still haven't found Lup. it's not for a lack of trying — you've asked around everywhere. It's slow going, though, between the fact that you don't know anybody and the fact that you're a foreigner. But that doesn't bother you too much. 

You loiter on street corners and catch cats to hear their secrets. You buy drinks in taverns and let people make fun of your accent. You sold your surface food quickly and start making a name for yourself as someone who can make the fungal edibles of the Neath taste like something sun-grown. Not to mention, the Botanist apparently has a (small, semi-illegal) garden of surface-plants, some of which he trades you for your cooking and canning. Strawberry preserves apparently goes for a king's ransom, down here. 

You're getting by. The day-to-day of your life is doable — not so different from your life on the surface. The only change is that instead of being paid in coin, you get paid in Echoes, secrets, handfuls of luminous beetles, slivers of warm brass, greenish candles, rostygold, moon-pearls, and all sorts of fun trinkets. Your pockets overflow with oddities. 

What bothers you is that nobody seems to have heard your sister's name. It troubles you that Lup, who picked the particularly bombastic name of of "Pyrotechnic" hasn't made any waves. Nobody talks about fireworks, about classrooms set on fire, about the woman who learned enough Correspondence (what is the Correspondence?) to accidentally turn an abandoned library in the Forbidden Quarter to glass because of the flames. She wrote telling you about all these things, all her misadventures that ended up in the papers. You know they happened. But no one seems to remember them. 

There's something there, something that trips a wire at the back of your mind. But you can't quite grasp it. 

Her fiance is worried as well. He's more philosophic about it than you are, though. "Maybe she's just dead, Taako," the Necromancer tells you. "People down here disappear all the time. She might just be gone." 

The thought doesn't seem to bother him. You guess he's called a necromancer for a reason. The Necromancer's _weird_ , for all the he acts the bumbling academic. He doesn't have a soul, either. Lup never told you about that — She knows you would have flipped. 

"Sold it to the devils a fair few years back," he tells you, completely cavalier. "Startup costs for me and Lup's research were getting out of hand, and brilliant souls go for a pretty penny." 

"You think your soul's briliant?" 

He shrugs. "The devils thought it was." He claps you on the back. "Don't worry about it, the soulfree life is perfectly normal down here. Well. Sorta normal. Benthic's got a good soulfree community, at least." 

"Lup was okay with that?"

"She suggested it. Actually, she suggested selling her own, first — but she wanted to go back up to the surface, and you can't do that without a soul, I think. So, I offered." 

That gave you the shivers. But the Necromancer's perfectly nice, or at least he's not particularly threatening. He loves your sister; that's a good a character reference as anything. 

Despite his blase attitude to your sister's hypothetical death, the Necromancer is wildly concerned about all the other things that could happen to her. He tells you that Lup left on a scientific expedition last month, that she had planned to be gone a while. But she should have been back a few weeks ago. "Sometimes expeditions get out of hand, though," he says. "I just wish I had gone with her. I should have gone with her." 

He's afraid of things you didn't even know where possibilities. Becoming a Drownie. Being exiled to the Tomb-colonies. Heading North. Becoming a Jack-of-Smiles. Playing knife-and-candle. Falling afoul of the devils, the rubbery men, a rival. He worries that she's become something that doesn't want to come back to him. He's been looking for her every moment he's not at Benthic. You join him, spending every moment you're not scrounging for rent or rations pounding the pavement. 

"I hope to gods she's dead," he confesses to you. "At least then she'll be back soon, she's crazy at cards." 

"She always cheats," you tell him. "Drives me nuts." 

He laughs. 

"She said the same about you!" 

Barry's good people, really. 

You're boarding in rooms above a dusty bookshop. The Necromancer had let you sleep on his couch for a week or so, which was nice of him, considering he had no idea you were coming. It was surreal, seeing the rooms him and your sister were sharing, her knickknacks and junk everywhere. She has a photo of the two of you on her desk. It's the one from when you were seven-ish and living with your aunt, the nice one, the one who died. Lup's got a full wardrobe of Faerun clothing. You steal one of her hats. Why'd she bring an umbrella down here? There's no rain. 

The Carpenter you met on your original trip is splitting a bedroom with you. He was the one who suggested it, though your were the one who found the two of you lodging. You like Magnus a lot, despite your original intentions. He's just so aggressively friendly.

And besides, you're both searching for people. 

"Her name's Julia, sort of," the Carpenter told you on the third day of your journey down the Cumaean Canal, before you docked at the Canal's staging area to transfer ships to get to London. The two of you were sharing a bottle of mushroom wine, pilfered from the ship's hold. "She's from Faerun. But I met her in Twosun. She said she wanted to see the Surface before she died." 

"Jeez m'dude. That's morbid." 

"Right? That's what I said." He looks troubled. "Apparently death doesn't really matter down here. But you can't go back to the surface if you die." 

That gives you pause. If Lup's dead, then she can't go back to Twosun with you, ever. You thought she was planning on coming back. But between the fiance, the research, her entire life down here, really, you wonder if that was just something she said to placate you. You wonder how much you ever really knew your sister. 

The Carpenter keeps talking. 

"I don't even know what she goes by down here," the Carpenter laughs. "It's kind of stupid, isn't it?" 

"Kind of, yeah," you agree. It's very romantic. 

"She was calling herself Julia, back in Twosun," he says wistfully. "I was thinking about asking her to marry me. She woulda been Julia Burnsides." 

"Jeez," you say again. You can't imagine that sort of commitment. And he doesn't even know what she calls herself. "Well, I'll keep a look-out, I guess." 

"And I'll ask around about your sister." 

The two of you shake on it. He pulls you into a hug. Woah, easy there, big guy. 

"Thanks for letting me talk about this," he says. 

"Yeah no problem, m'dude," you say awkwardly, and pat him on the back. 

It's nice, to have someone sort of on your side. You don't all-the-way trust him, but the Carpenter is genuine in a way that you don't remember anyone else in your life being — well, maybe Lup, but she was never so unguarded. You forgot that you liked living with other people. 

There's two other people living above the bookshop as well. There's the white-haired woman who introduced herself as the Quiet Scribe. She is, as her name suggests, quiet, and a little sarcastic. You can't tell how old she is. Magnus bets she's forty. You think she's twenty-ish. 

She's the sole owner of the bookshop. You think she's a Faerun native. The Necromancer introduced you to her — he boarded above her shop before him and Lup starting bunking together. She's met Lup, and instantly endears herself to you by talking about how much she liked your sister. Sometimes you or the Carpenter help her in the shop. It's easy work, and comfortable. 

The Scribe runs the shop alongside a short man with a mustache who she calls the Absentee Captain. You wonder where he's absent from. 

He's...off. A little nuts. Not a lot nuts, not like the Topsy King and his his court up in the Flit, but he never says anything but "Davenport!" and you're not sure how _there_ he is. When he's particularly lucid, he runs errands for the Scribe, and if there's something particularly large he needs to take, he somehow manages to bully you or the Carpenter into helping him without having to say a word. You don't think he's stupid. Just a little not-all-the-way-there.

You ask the Scribe about it once, one morning after you and the Carpenter help the Captain haul a few boxes of books over to Summerset on the back of a couple of rented velocipedes. The three of you return with sore muscles and sweaty limbs. The Captain runs inside the bookshop and returns with three glasses of ice-water as you and the Carpenter lock the velocipedes to the railing. The Scribe follows him out.

"Thank you, boys," she says. 

"No probs, Scribe," the Carpenter says. 

"Davenport!" Cap says to you, and hands the two of you glasses. 

"You're hella welcome, Cap," you say. He grins at you and the Carpenter shoot him a thumbs up as he dashes off. You and the Scribe watch him go. The Carpenter watches the Scribe. 

"What's Cap'nport keep saying?" 

"A name that doesn't belong to anyone, anymore," the Scribe tells you, and goes back inside.

"Is it his name?" you ask, but she's already closed the door behind her. 

**Author's Note:**

> im @[anonymousalchemist](http://anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com/) if you wanna talk taz or want to check out haphazard pieces of fic/meta i dont post here. xoxo seeyaaaaaa 
> 
> also! let me know what you thought! i adore feedback with the passion of a thousand THESUNTHESUNTHESUN


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